The Materiality of Sound — and the idiocy of the graduate student.

Nassau St. NY. 1926

Everyone knows that graduate students have plenty of time for their life, their passions, their relax, and their significant others. Because of this constant free time, I decided that I should not pay attention to the syllabus and I picked the readings for the 12th of April, instead of the ones for the 5th. Loyal to the spirit of the blog as a “reading” one, I decided that today I will write about the Sound, hoping to be heard.

The article of Mark M. Smith “Sound—So What?,” published on the November 2015 issue of The Public Historian[1] represent a manifesto of the importance of adding sound in our discipline. The scholar put his hear on the rail and explains how a new train of historians is coming at full speed. Smith discusses about recent books and articles on this argument demonstrating the possibilities offered by the new studies. These opportunities rarely offer groundbreaking discoveries on the past, but surely offer a more deep understanding of it.

One of the works analyzed by Smith is Emily Ann Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity[2], a book that was actually our assignment for the week (well not for this week…). A marvelous study on how the perception and handling of sound changed in the first third of the twentieth century, the book resounds too well with my personal interest in the history of technology.

Indeed, science and technology are of central importance in the book, because the concept of sound changed only when from an expression felt from the senses, it became a physical expression of the material world. Throughout her work, Thompson describes well this transformation: from the alchemic understanding of a society used to feel, but not describe empirically the sound, the discoveries in acoustic transformed sound in something that had understandable qualities; this step cleared the path for others, who used the modern instruments offered by the new electronical devices to understand the interaction of sound and object. But there is a very important aspect of the question that Thompson does not forget: people felt the sound, had ideas on it, interacted with the possibilities and the danger that it offered them: it is this kind of interaction that makes history. This connection changed the society and provoked the transformations of the world, from the noisy streets of the new metropolis to the pure beauty of the Symphony Halls.

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[1] Mark M. Smith, “Sound—So What?,” The Public Historian 37:4 (November 2015): 132-44.

[2] Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002).

Tu paper es mi paper.

Sometimes I wonder if I am a pretty self-centered person. Perhaps it is mostly our human condition that force us to an inability to perceive anything outside of ourselves, but I always hope that the power of abstraction of our brains (or at least of mine, to return to the self-centered me) would permit to see the world — I should say imagine it — with a perspective different from ours. It would be a fundamental instrument of the student to “clean” their mind and receive the information in the most uninfluenced way possible, at least at the moment of the acquisition of new info.

This almost not human ability obviously is utopian. In addition, a better analysis could suggest that we learn only when we interiorize the knowledge, when the understanding enter in conversation with our precedent experience.

This is what happened with this week’s reading: it was almost impossible to me to separate my work on the 1916 magazine and the readings. Even if I fear that I lost some lessons, what really remained afloat were the parts that strongly bonded with my research.

For example, Igor Kapitoff[1] suggested the biography of objects, which for my magazine would lay down roughly like this:

-          Newspaper as a fresh product

-          Newspaper as an old product

-          The object as a relatively rare merchandise

-          The collecting object

-          The object as a personal memory

The last “age” of its life fits perfectly in the description that Kopytoff make of the “collective hunger” for object made not for lasting, a need that transforms the objects from worthless results of mass production to “singular.”[2]

Kopitoff, Daniel Miller, and Peter Stallybrass all show the power of Material Culture and a weakness in a theorization of the discipline. If in Stallybrass and Kopitoff this interpretation is probably coming from my personal struggle on the matter, Miller[3] dedicates ample space in describing this fascinating contrast of powerful practicality of a generally un-codifiable discipline.

However, even such a distrusting student as I am on these theorizations have to admit that there is power and possibility even in the often reductive and destructive theory. To create a system to understand chaos offers often a strong scaffold for the analysis.

Peter Stallybrass[4] offers a perfect example in this with his beautiful paper on Marx’s Coat. The analysis of Marx’s theories and works and the abstractions of Material Culture at the beginning slow down the reader, but when the practice of Material Culture free the theories from their own chains funneling the power of their messages in a delightful insight of Marx’s personal life that connects the philosopher to his ideas through his personal objects. If the theory is powerful, it is the practice around it that blossoms, clearing out the fog and letting me, clearly irritated by the world of abstraction, enjoy the fruitful results.

The final cherry on the cake was the connection that Stallybrass makes between Marx’s life and the technology, in particular with the invention and mass production of paper made out of wood pulp.[5] Because I am self-centered as probably everyone, dear Marx, tu paper es mi paper: a beautiful and colorful magazine of 1916.

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[1] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[2] Ibid. 80.

[3] Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).

[4] Peter Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat," in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998).

[5] Stallybrass, 200.

There is space for everything, in the landscape.

            To define Material Culture and its boundaries is a daunting task. Either the category is too broad or too narrow: everything is material and so everything could be inserted in to a Material Culture study, at the same time what is the point of a taxonomic organization if the group that we utilize encompasses everything?

            This week’s readings stretch the limits of Material Culture considering the environment itself as an object that deserves attention like a hand-crafted pot or a mass-produced stereo system. Surely the environment is a collection of objects and nobody with any rationality would negate the fact that the environment materiality is a fact, but to reduce the complex system of any environment could seem a reductive perspective. Yet to analyze the environment in its materiality offers powerful instruments to decode numerous aspects of the interaction between human beings and the landscape they live in. Indeed too often the environment is reduced to a too-theoretical and distant scenery that is disjointed from the decisions and lives of the people that inhabit it, while on the contrary the environment influences and is influenced strongly by human choices.

            Kenneth Ames[1] and Angel Kwolek-Folland[2] show clearly how strong the link is between the environment and society: the house and the workplace reflect not only the practical adaptations of the places where human beings live and work, but also the social expectations and etiquette rules that constitute the web of social interactions of modern and complex societies. Both the scholars describe situations of a very structured society such as the late Victorian one. The implications of their work however cast an interesting light even on contemporary times, and it is easy to ask ourselves questions such as the meaning in our lives of the homogenous Ikea furniture in houses or the new structures of office furniture and spatial separations in offices.

Regarding another era, more distant from us, is the work of Dell Upton[3], who explains the spatial dynamics in the life of slaves in Virginia during the eighteenth century. Social hierarchy and slave-owner interaction defined the space, creating shared areas and exclusive ones. The freedom and privacy of the woods for example allowed the slaves to set themselves temporarily free from the controlling eye of the owners.

            John Brinckerhoff Jackson[4] in one of the multiple and variegated chapters of his book analyses the woods as environment and its history. The perspective is totally focused on the interactions between men and the forest and this viewpoint can help us to understand the relationship between landscape and Material Culture. The forest itself is not the center of the study: the dendrochronology and the biological aspect of the life of trees could be part of it, but it is not the focus. Material Culture, inserting the landscape in to the list of tools with which men interact with, defines the environment as a medium that influences humans and is strongly influenced by them. Our eyes love the sweet slopes of Tuscany, their natural pleasantness attracts thousands of tourists from around the globe, but few of them know that every slope is the result of thousands of years of agriculture. Human hands made them.

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[1] Kenneth Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America,” Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 9 (1978): 19-46.

[2] Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Gendered Environment of the Corporate Workplace, 1880-1930,” in

Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, eds. The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of

Material Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 157-79.

[3] Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Robert Blair St. George,

ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

[4] John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994).

De Somniis

Plowing through the tough terrain laid out by Roland Barthes[1], two concepts caught my attention: the difference between the photograph as an uncoded object and the drawing as a coded one; and the linguistic connotation of most of the images.

I am troubled with this differentiation that Barthes makes between photographs and illustrations, because in a world with Photoshop and the marvels of computer graphics the distinction sounds artificial. Surely we should bear in mind that Barthes, writing in 1986, had not yet experienced the new technological marvels in the world of the image, but even only considering the analogic photograph, with the strong mediation of the composition, which was sometimes “artificially posed”, the choice of exposure, the modifications in developing the negative, and the opportunities that the photographer had in printing the photograph the borders between uncoded and coded become at more fuzzy. Yet perhaps I understand the direction of his meaning in that he was trying to separate the two mediums and consider the aspects that part the producer from the represented object. With this perspective the separation becomes more a distinction between the hand of the artist and the mechanical shutter of the camera.

The second consideration, the observation that most of the images that surround us are not pure images, but have a component of writing that is fundamental in communicating the message, caught my attention. If anyone looks at a photograph of Tokyo, it is difficult to understand the message of the colored advertising on the streets without reading Japanese. Images are direct, less mediated than words perhaps, but at the same time if they convey the message in a strong and fast way they miss the precision of the written word, the capacity to describe concepts that need a certain finesse.

In the pages of La Domenica del Corriere there is a clear mistrust of the image in this regard: the captions are long and descriptive. While the images brought the atmosphere, the adventure, and the action, the text supported them strongly with the context. The world in 1916 was a different one: few people traveled, even outside of their city (moreover in Italy), and there was no internet to provide a window to the world. Your room was your room only, and even if books could provide the exotic travel that most people could not afford, they did not provide the mental elasticity that we have in recognizing the context of a photo (which surely is still limited).

The illusions, deceptions, and trompe l’oeil that Wendy Bellion describes in her book[2] did not want captions. The solution of the mystery, the precise moment when the eye of the observer realized with marvel the trick of the artist was the final goal of the piece of art. A caption would have spoiled the whole experience. The eye was supposed to be confused and reader of the book looking at the images without captions can enjoy a little bit of what the viewer in real life would experience; when the mind of the observer does not understand the reality yet, the image becomes part of the tridimensional world: part of the architecture, of a landscape, or even convincing —allegedly— the cunning Washington to politely bow in front of a painting, thinking that it was a person.

            Bellion builds up a very interesting analysis of the illusions that early-republic citizen enjoyed, but still indulges perhaps a little bit too much in the “American bubble”, forgetting sometimes to connect well these illusions to the most likely sources of their inspiration in the old, dusty Europe.

Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts -Trompe-l'œil with letters and pens (1660-1683).

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[1] Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image—Music—Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 32- 51.

[2] Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Pressing problems

I confess, I am a maker too.

Historians are writers. Some interpret the job as storytellers, others as philosopher/theorists who dwell in the platonic world of ideas, others as proficient technicians who only follow the rule of good academia. Common terrain for everyone is the land of words. Sieged by armies of modern archeologists, collectors, and amateurs of vintage technology or folk art, historians need to find their niche and focus on doing what is their job: to write books.
Public historians are dismissed as half-historians perhaps for this precise reason, because to write books is not their goal. It could be, but in the interaction with the public that crowns the flag of public history writing books loses the monopoly of their attention.
What about Material Culture? Again the problem lies in the different nature of objects and words. Surely any word in any book is the result of the interaction among objects, from the relatively simple ink and pen to the sophisticated laser printers now in any office. Yet the middle-realm of words, half concept, half object, allows the historian to indulge only on the first part, relegating the past to a virtual world of ideas.
However, the world is concrete, and despite our theorization of it, real objects, the ones that you and me touch and use, are the actual heritage from the past. The historian often does not deal with this past at all, and even when it happens, the result is a book, and again the theory.
Reading David Pye and his analysis on the workmanship of risk and workmanship of certainty (human-made and machine-made in a nutshell) and Morozov’s article in the New Yorker on the Maker Movement the question on the connection between historians and the making process pops out clearly in my mind.

What is the meaning of life? Can I surf the gravitational waves? (sorry, not related, but I like Monty Python)

Or better:

Do the historians understand how the objects are made? If not, would it change the perspective that they choose in writing about the past?

Do the historians understand how the objects are made? If not, would it change the perspective that they choose in writing about the past?

Yes. Because I say so.
And because to understand how an object was made gives evidence on how the object was imagined, projected and the ideas that led to the object itself. There is a very good documentary on Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press with Stephen Fry . 

(HERE, highly suggested).

There is obviously no footnote, no index and shame of shames, no bibliography, yet you see the making of the press, you understand the difficulties, the different steps that led from the idea to the printing of the first books, the environment that seeded in Gutenberg the project for the object that definitely changed the world.
Talking about printing, how was my dear newspaper of 1916 made? Words, surely, but also paper, inks (it is colored!), and machinery. Will I be able to find out? I am almost as interested in this answer as to solution of what is the meaning of life.

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David Pye, “The Workmanship of Certainty and the Workmanship of Risk,” in The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

Evgeny Morozov, “Making It: Pick Up a Spot Welder and Join the Revolution,” The New Yorker (January 13, 2014) 

C’mon Indiana, no gold this time.

Let’s start with the end: “It is terribly important that the ‘small thing forgotten’ be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured.”[p. 259]

From the title of James Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten, it would seem that the focus for good history — archeology to be precise — is the small objects that are dug up from the layers of the past. In one sense it is, both because an archeologist passes most of his time in the field sifting through the dirt to find any small piece of pottery or any other material that had been manipulated by man, and because throughout the book Deetz masterly immerses the reader in the fascinating and sometimes even touching world of the people that lived and experienced their lives around these objects.

Yet Deetz in analyzing these objects takes serious care to highlight patterns. Anything coming from the past has the dual nature of evidence and narrative. From the smoke pipe to the house, but in a bigger sense also events, writings, ideas and, as reported in the book, music, all constitute the language that a world long gone uses to talk about itself; as with words, objects possess a meaning by themselves, but together they don’t just describe to an acute observer what they were meant for and how they were used, but they paint a picture of the society around them, its culture and religion.

Deetz in almost a romantic way dwells in the cemeteries, were his dialogue with Shakespeare’s Yorik does not bring an existential question on the human life — a question on which, at least for compassion, any historian should indulge in sometimes — but a very interesting description on the stylistic changes of the decoration on the gravestones. Deetz handles the dangerous argument with the efficient toolbox of archeology, double-checking and cross-referencing, using statistics and analyzing the properties of the materials.

The patterns pop out clearly from the carefully assembled investigation. From the single objects, even the single fragment of pottery, comes out the whole image. Clearly the past is lost, it is a memory with blurred contours: something is lost forever, like the burned-down house were Cato Howe, a freed slave that fought in the Revolution, lived from 1792 until his death in 1823. Cato is now only a name, even his face is lost, yet this somewhat depressing thought is counterbalanced by the present: we, the present, are his heritage, and we can reconstruct the past thanks to his actions, such as the structure of the foundations of the house that he built, the legal documents that attest that the community granted him some land, and the meager list of things that he left behind after his departure.

Two lessons are clear from In Small Things Forgotten: the power of the connection of objects, its “Aura” —if we want to steal from Benjamin’s theories from the last week—, and the strength of evidence, which comes only from research and accumulation of data.

Nothing new perhaps, but reading such a pleasant work renews again the passion for the lost little things of the past for us little Indiana Jones: he was an archeologist too! The newspaper is perhaps not as “valuable” as the Sacred Grail, but I bet that Indiana thrived for the action, not for the money.

Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: [an Archaeology of Early American Life]. Expanded and rev. ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.

“What a fitting end to your life's pursuits. You're about to become a permanent addition to this archaeological find. Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

Let's not dig in the wrong place though.

Of Sea and Meteorology

Ah the memories of Art History, when the young green me was immersed in the study of beauty: magnificent paintings and objects, the lives of the artists of the past, the beautiful macros that show the painting techniques and the chisel of master sculptors. I loved the descriptions of how colors were gathered, shipped around the world in long journeys on caravels or caravans, then mixed with alchemical competence and applied layer by layer with techniques learned in a lifetime of dedication to the craft.

Then, to counterbalance the beauty of these studies, the insubstantial analyses on style: sometimes they were fascinating (moreover if well written), other times contorted and labyrinthine, but in general they left me with the unpleasant feeling that I had not learned much.

Jennifer T. Roberts paper[1] offered me both feelings. In the first half the transoceanic travel of the painting helps in showing a vision of a very large world now disappeared: the vast distances, the painting’s movement from hand to hand to its destination, the long delay between the making of the art piece and its exhibition. The analysis of how Copley carefully planned the theme of the painting is also interesting. Then the bitter taste of the pains of the undergraduate studies: the drapery and the perspective linking Copley to Empiricism, despite five hundred years of drapery painting and perspective studies that predated Copley.

Walter Benjamin’s paper[2] excels in showing the limits of my understanding. I could say that it is the language barrier, but I am perfectly aware that my mind is the problem. Between some very satisfactory (for my ego) errors and sparse concepts that I understood and appreciated, a dense fog obscured my general understanding of the meaning of the paper. Not language barrier, it was a meteorological issue.

Then the dense mist lifted; there was light again when Michael Yonan[3] and Charles F. Montgomery[4] blew off the haze. Yonan’s call for an Art History focused more on the materiality of the analyzed objects let me cheer in a very un-academic way. Montgomery’s practical guide to the evaluation of an object had the taste of a behind-the-scenes trip in the mind of one who has reached excellence: with clarity and nonchalance he leads through the multiple steps with the ease of a seasoned guide of a hidden wing of a magnificent museum.

The readings of this week confirmed what I miss and what I don’t of Art History: there is a limit to what we can deduct from an object, and the evidence that we have draws this border. Any analysis that is based on weak or no evidence is, in my personal view, just an opinion. The papers helped me in better defining the line; a lesson that I hope to use well in dealing with my beautiful object. That old magazine deserves some respect.

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[1] Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” in Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014).

[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

[3] Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86 th  18 (2011): 232-48.

[4] Charles F. Montgomery, "The Connoisseurship of Artifacts," in Thomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (London: Altamira Press, 1999).